What's up on the smolweb? July 2026 roundup

2026-07-30

Summer is here, the big web is choking on AI slop, and the smolweb keeps quietly growing. Here is a roundup of what happened on the small web, the smolnet, and around the Gemini protocol in July 2026. [...]

The perfect equipment set

2026-07-28

People often ask me what I actually use, day to day, to do the things I write about here. The honest answer is: not much. Four devices, a couple of cables, and a strong opinion about each one. This is that list, and why each item earns its place. [...]

I am a smolweb advocate and, sometimes, I use LLMs.

2026-05-02

I spend a lot of time thinking about simplicity. Fewer dependencies, lighter pages, tools that do one thing well. So yes, it might look strange that I also spend time talking to large language models. Let me explain where I draw the line, and why I think the contradiction is smaller than it appears. [...]

The Fediverse deserves a dumb graphical client

2026-04-09

I love the Fediverse. I have been on it for years, and it remains the only social network where I actually enjoy spending time. No algorithmic feed pushing outrage, no dark patterns, no surveillance capitalism. Just people talking to each other over an open protocol. [...]

All my clients wanted a carousel, now it's an AI chatbot!

2026-03-14

It always starts the same way. The client pulls out their phone mid-meeting, navigates to a competitor's website, and holds the screen up like evidence. "You see? They have one of those." A little bubble. Bottom right corner. Blinking... [...]

Building your first smolweb page

2026-03-01

A simple news article that takes ten seconds to load and eats 50 MB of data. You've seen that. We all have. Mountains of JavaScript, giant CSS frameworks, third-party trackers, custom fonts pulled from remote servers... all of that to display a few paragraphs of text. [...]

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